GENDERED IDENTITY AND THE LOST FEMALE : hybridity as a partial experience in the anglophone... caribbean performances

This book offers an exploration of the postcolonial hybrid experience in anglophone Caribbean plays and performance from a feminist perspective. In a hitherto unattempted consideration of Caribbean theatre and performance, this study of gendered identities chronicles the postcolonial hybrid experience – and how it varies in the context of questions of sex, performance and social designation. In the process, it examines the diverse performances of the anglophone Caribbean. The work includes works by Caribbean anglophone playwrights like Derek Walcott, Mustapha Matura, Michael Gikes, Dennis Scott, Trevor Rhone, Earl Lovelace and Errol John with more recent works of Pat Cumper, Rawle Gibbons and Tony Hall. The study would also engage with Carnival, calypso and chutney music, while commenting on its evolving influences over the hybrid imagination. Each section covers the dominant socio-political thematics associated with the tradition and its effect on it, followed by an analysis of contemporaneously significant literary and cultural works – plays, carnival narrative and calypso and chutney lyrics as well as the experiences of performers. From Lovelace’s fictional Jestina to the real-life Drupatee, the book critically explores the marginalization of female performances while forming a hybrid identity. Shrabani Basu is an Assistant Professor of English at Deshabandhu Mahavidyalaya, Chittaranjan, India. She holds PhD, MPhil and MA degrees from The English and Foreign Languages (EFL) University, Hyderabad. Her doctoral research focused on Caribbean performance studies. In recent years, she has shifted her focus to experiences of horror in the postcolonial realm. She predominantly publishes on postcolonial feminism About This Book Contents About the Author 1 Independence and Oil Boom: Hybridity and the Changing Face of Caribbean Gender Identity 1.1 Political and Economic Change 1.2 Socio-Cultural Change 1.3 Gender Politics in the Caribbean Before and Around 1972 Notes Works Cited 2 Race, Performance, Identity, and the Possibility of an Incomplete Articulation of Hybridity 2.1 Construction of Racial and Ethnic Identity in the Caribbean 2.2 Concept of Hybridity and Its Incomplete Articulation 2.3 The Interconnection of Drama, Calypso and Carnival Notes Works Cited 3 “To Put Two Cold Coins”: The Polarized Identities in Caribbean Drama 3.1 Folklore, Rituals and Carnival: Many Faces of Caribbean Theatrical Performances 3.2 Dream on Monkey Mountain and Ti Jean and His Brothers: Walcott’s Myth of Masculine Hybridity 3.3 Internalized Hegemony and the Exaggeration of Complacence: Trevor D. Rhone’s Old Story Time 3.4 Motley of Choice and Change: Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl 3.5 Rawle Gibbon’s “I Lawah”: The Canboulay in Theatre 3.6 “woman like you... like me”: Pat Cumper’s “The Rapist” Notes Works Cited 4 Carnival as a Partial Expression of Gendered Reality 4.1 Carnival: Tradition or a Modern Bacchanalia 4.2 Bakhtin and the Idea of the Carnivalesque 4.3 Carnival as Ritual 4.4 Canboulay: Emergence of a Carnival of Color 4.5 Carnival and the Gender Equation 4.6 The Changing Face of the Carnival Notes Works Cited 5 “Instead of Having One Race, You Know I Got Two”: Calypso and Chutney as Voices from the Fringe 5.1 Calypso and the Absence of “Jean” and “Dinah” 5.2 Music Off the Jahaj: Music of the Indo-Caribbean Notes Works Cited 6 Conclusion Works Cited Bibliography Index